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You want quickies, I want to tell you about MMOGs. The Star Trek Online MMOG is moving forward with a new site for the Paramount online world. So far it is light on the details, but they assure us they'll have more in the near future. I probably don't need to tell you, but World of Warcraft rolled out a new patch earlier this week, adding in a high level raid dungeon and making it easier to get into the Battlegrounds. My guildies were having trouble getting past the first room in Blackwing's Lair last night, so my assumption is that Blizz has really come up with something special here. Speaking of fantasy MMOGs, the Everquest II Desert of Flames expansion pack is fast approaching, and both IGN and Gamespot have news and movies from the sandy, hot, new area. City of Villains will be opening up into Beta later this year, and to whet your appetite Voodoo Extreme has a bevy of CoV screens. Finally, Final Fantasy XI is adding in some interesting new stuff in the next couple of patches. A title selector, a summonable buddy, and changes to experience acquisition are all in the pipeline for the popular MMOG.

Don't let Paramount screw up Star Trek Online! From what I have read so far, it's about the only MMOG that I would pay $15 a month to play. If they implement this thing the way they're talking about doing it, it could REALLY be a lot of fun. I especially like how it seems to promote the "lesser" assignments (as in, you don't have to be a command-track person if you don't want to). I just hope they manage to make the game "feel" like Star Trek...

We want to formally address player concerns regarding issues found in Blackwing Lair. Blackwing Lair is currently the highest tier raid dungeon in the game, designed to be a very challenging encounter for even the most powerful guilds to defeat. Since its launch, we have discovered some key issues which are making Blackwing encounters easier than intended. This applies to both Razorgore and Vaelastraz encounters. One related issue is

Read that again. Two points are made. First, the door does not open, which is a bug. Second, if you find a way to get through the door (I'm aware of a guild that used the fear effect of Deviate Delights to run a couple people through the door), you're exploiting. (The ostensible reason is that it would at a later date allow you to completely skip the encounter.)

we have discovered some key issues which are making Blackwing encounters easier than intended. This applies to both Razorgore and Vaelastraz encounters.

I donno about you but it sounds to me they simply weren't prepared to deal with the sheer number of level 60 players. Even the toughest bosses fall to sheer numbers, especially when those numbers are max leveled players and creative, clever players.

You *are* aware that these raid dungeons are specifically designed for a full raid of 40 players, level 60 of course, and that it's impossible to get more than 40 into a single instance of the dungeon? More players just means more instances.

From TFFAQ: The game's starting point is set some time following the latest movie (i.e. Nemesis). However, there will be missions with storylines and characters from other parts of the Star Trek franchise.

If you had a choice of time settings it would probably be good. Limiting it to TNG era and introducing time travel leads me to believe that they should name it BitchFest- 'cause that's all they're going to get.

Having the game set in the TNG era doesn't necessarily mean they'll be using time travel. At the time of TNG, you could also have missions from DS9 and Voyager, since they all occured at the same time. They might not have a day for day overlap, but for a game, I could consider it acceptable to treat those three as if they were happening simultaneously.

And Vulcans are long lived, so Spock is still kicking around. I think Kirk is dead, but Scotty was kept alive without aging via the transporter loop on the Dison Sphere. Bones was still alive at the begining of TNG, he'd be ancient but no reason he couldn't make an appearance.

" We want to formally address player concerns regarding issues found in Blackwing Lair. Blackwing Lair is currently the highest tier raid dungeon in the game, designed to be a very challenging encounter for even the most powerful guilds to defeat. Since its launch, we have discovered some key issues which are making Blackwing encounters easier than intended. This applies to both Razorgore and Vaelastraz encounters. One related issue is also preventing the door to open after Vaelastrasz dies, not allowing players to advance beyond the Vaelastrasz the Corrupted encounter. While this is a bug, players currently should not be able to progress beyond the Vaelastraz encounter by any means, and anyone found in areas beyond the second door will be considered to be exploiting the game."
So the offical word from blizzard is.
1. we made a super hard high level end game area.
2. Its bugged, horridly bugged, and it some how got past Q/a, Playtesting, and we've ignored public play testing, until it went live.
3. If you get in and the gate bug doesnt block you out then you're exploiting.
which leads me to think, that BWL was never finished to begin with. Oh and for some reason they're telling people not to use custom UI mods... very weird.

crap sorry about the formatting,
1. we made a super hard high level end game area. 2. Its bugged, horridly bugged, and it some how got past Q/a, Playtesting, and we've ignored public play testing, until it went live. 3. If you get in and the gate bug doesnt block you out then you're exploiting.

which leads me to think, that BWL was never finished to begin with. Oh and for some reason they're telling people not to use custom UI mods... very weird.

It's obvious they should have done some more Quality Assurance on BWL, but you do have to applaud their reasons for not putting in on the public test realms.

On the test realm, items can be duped by re-copying characters and through this any end-game area can be exploited by unrealistic equipment. BWL would have been cruised through on the test realm and any sort of suspense about the area would have been completely destroyed.

Doesn't that sort of defeat most of the purpose of a test realm? Sure, to see if the new bug got smashed, but also to balance areas, mobs, etc? And what purpose would allowing duping to happen achieve?

Actually, you can't do that. You can only copy two characters over. I suppose you could mule items from one character to the other to dupe that way, but since almost everything useful is "Soulbound" (untradeable) that wouldn't be that big an issue.

Lava cores, fiery cores, core leather, arcanite bars, sulfuron ingots, dark iron, mooncloth, many epic weapon quest starter items, etc. are all not soul bound and with a dedicated guild can be duped en masse trivially to the test server. (Give them all to one player, he transfers his one character twice, repeat with entire guild.) I fail to see how loading up your entire guild with 6+ months worth of crafted equipment to trivialize a new dungeon could possibly help balance testing.

"Oh and for some reason they're telling people not to use custom UI mods... very weird."

I installed the updated CTMOD before connecting yesterday and haven't run into problems. I have seen problems noted with using mods that haven't been updated. In particular the popular Atlas mod supposedly has problems.I don't really see any difference between this patch and any other when it comes to UI mods - disable them until your mod is updated or expect possible weirdness and crashiness.

The thing about UI mods is apparently a miscommunication between the legal team and the devs/designers. One of their community managers has stated that it would be a nightmare for them to authorize a certain list of UI mods, and they'll probably just prohibit (read: block) certain scripting methods. Supposedly the legal team was just issuing an unfounded blanket statement ("if blizzard should ever issue a list of authorized third-party..")

Nope, apparently if you actually read the EULA they threw in something about only being able to use Blizzard-approved mods in the future.. hang on...

"At such time that Blizzard elects to post a list of approved Third-Party User Interfaces on its website, you agree that you will use only those Third-Party User Interfacers approved by Blizzard, and that you will use no other Third-Party User Interfaces in connection with World of Warcraft."

But with the ability to mod, it becomes the most amazingly flexible UI I've seen for any video game, ever. I'll take it over any other MMOs UI. They did it exactly the right way. If you don't want to mod it yourself, there's plenty of mod sites out there.

Since it hasn't even hit the test server yet, I don't think we'll be seeing it in August no matter what the devs say. With all the Pumpkin heads in the screenshots, and the fact that CoV's beta will probably open in a couple weeks, I'm think it'll probably be early or mid October.

For what it's worth EVE [eve-online.com] just put out a new content patch as well. Added a metric fuck-ton of new content including new ship classes, new styles of PvE story-line encounters and some new Player Manufactured stations which will give the already amazing PvP system even more strategic (and yes I mean strategic) depth. The game just flat out owns. And I'm not afraid to say that since it's almost 14-year-old proof. People tired of meaningless arcade PvP in other massives should try out EVE, where your actions actually make a difference.

And the best thing about Eve is that content and gameplay expansions of the like that would fill a CD come completely free, and the dev team are the most up-front and open group I've seen working on a game of this scale.

No other game I've seen has this level of meaningful player-generated content. In how many other games can the players actively rule a sizeable portion of the universe?

Free 14-day trials available through the buddy program - just find someone who plays already and ask!

Yeah, I gave up for a while because I realised that a couple of hours a week isn't nearly enough to put towards Eve. There's so much depth to the game that I don't think you could ever keep up with all of it.

Not only is City of Villains coming out (and I won a guaranteed beta slot in a contest! woot!), but so is City of Heroes Issue 5 [cityofheroes.com], the Forest of Dread.

It adds:

* 4 new villain groups* New zone* New task force* 2 new "events" (in one, hellions are setting fire to a building and you have to stop them, and the other has something to do with trolls and superadine)* 2 new power sets (Archery, and Sonic Blast)* New debt system, new badges

Even cooler, a bunch of missions have been revamped with more complexity, like escort-the-NPC type missions and fighting off "waves of villains" (similar to the Terra Volta trial you go through to earn a respec).

Also, no waiting, because this got patched in today, you can now "auto exemplar" into a task force or trial, which means 8 level 50s can decide they want to do the Positron task force, and it will auto-exemp (lower) their effective level to 16 (the max for that task force) and lock them in; no more needing half the party to be in the real range, and no more getting booted from the TF team if someone drops link. Yay!

The Regulators guild on Laughing Skull has defeated the first two bosses of BWL.
There is a way to get past the door if it bugs, but blizzard calls it an exploit.
Regardless, at 5:45 AM eastern time, after most of our guild had gone to bed, what pops up but "Server: A hotfix has been applied that should fix the bugs in Blackwing Lair preventing progress.", and another a few seconds later saying "Please reenter instance to fix it."
www.theregulators.org for kill screenshots.